PACHER, MICHAEL

A leading late-Gothic painter and woodcarver in the Tyrol; b. near Brixen, c. 1435; d. Bruneck?, 1498. Pacher's workshop in Bruneck was on an important alpine road, and Pacher himself seems to have traveled to northern Italy, first as a young painter in the 1450s and again about 1475. His art shows a synthesis between the north Italian style of Mantegna's frescoes in the Eremitani church, Padua, and the widespread early Netherlandish style of Rogier van der Weyden. Pacher's most important work is the "St. Wolfgang Altarpiece" (1471–81, St. Wolfgang, Austria), which has a carved wooden shrine with life-size colored figures in a "Coronation of the Virgin" and a predella forming the center for two pairs of double-tiered painted wings. The spiky, carved pinnacles of the frame contain painted and gilded wooden figures; the sharp, angular folds of their drapery can be paralleled in Pacher's paintings. Scenes from the life of Christ and of the Virgin are depicted with detailed realism in spatially roomy surroundings in which the "worm's-eye view" perspective has been derived from Mantegna. His "Altarpiece of the Four Latin Fathers" (c. 1483, Pinakothek, Munich) shows a further development. Instead of a series of independent pictures, there is a central perspective construction for the four panels, and the elaborately carved frame of the "St. Wolfgang Altarpiece" is here painted illusionistically. The monumental figures under ornate painted canopies carry on a lively dialogue with their foreshortened symbols.

Bibliography: e. hempel, Das Werk Michael Pachers (4th ed. Vienna 1941).

[m. m. schaefer]